 Welcome everybody! Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see so many of you here today. We have a very very important and vital topic and a lot to discuss. Today we're going to be diving into one aspect of automation and its impact on higher education. We're going to be looking at the chat GPT technology which is just appearing. Now usually in the forum we have one or two guests who are special experts in the topic but today we're putting together a kind of hive mind of everybody who's interested, everybody who's practiced with it, along with some people who are experts in different parts of it including digital writing, writing pedagogy, and artificial intelligence. So what we'd like to do is to get you all thinking about this and one way to help think about it is to use a few resources we have in the bottom left of the screen. You should see a kind of tan-colored box that says chat GPT or it says chat GPT resources. That'll take you to a web page, a blog post of mine which has a link to a few dozen articles, podcasts, and videos that may or may not be useful to you trying to think about this. So and in the chat right now Lee Scalarappesett just shared her Zotero library which is also available from that link there. Thank you for doing all that, Lee. John Hollenbeck asks if we could have just invited chat GPT to be a guest. Well actually thought about that, thought about doing that. It's pretty popular to use chat GPT just to give us some some fun feelings and in fact I asked chat GPT to describe the ideal video conversation and this is what it said. The ideal video conversation will likely be one where all participants bits are able to clearly see and hear each other and are able to easily communicate and understand what I'm talking about. The conversation will likely be engaging and enjoyable for all participants with everyone feeling comfortable and able to contribute to the discussion. The conversation also likely be productive with participants achieving their desired goals and outcomes from the conversation. Well thank you chat GPT. I hope we'll strive to do just all of that. So to begin with chat GPT was released about ten days ago. This is the latest version of a text chatbot created by OpenAI. If you haven't used it, if you go over the links that we've provided, you'll be able just to log in through various accounts and to start asking the chatbot questions. What's powerful about chat GPT is that it's able to draw on a greater library of text than ever before and seems to be more efficient and more convincing at least in making stuff up and in writing creating text than any chatbot technology has been yet. This has triggered huge amounts of controversy around the world, the people decrying it as the end of all possible writing prompts in higher education, threatening jobs, undoing writing as we know it. There's a whole bunch of ideas here and today we'll be going through all of them. Ricardo, Parita, the session has started. Welcome. I hope you can hear me. So just to begin with I would like to ask each of you if you could just volunteer some of your impressions of actually using chat GPT. If you have used it just either type it in the chat box or right click the raised hand. I'd be glad to bring you up on stage so you can describe it. Let me bring Brent Anders from the American University of Armenia and bring him up on stage. It's probably a crazy time for you there Brent. Welcome sir. Yes, so yeah it is 11 p.m. here so it's a little bit. You look great sir. You look great. Thank you. So yeah I wanted to volunteer. I did a little experiment today dealing with chat GPT and that I used to teach freshman seminar here at the university so I told it I asked it I said hey write a narrative essay about a special event that occurred in your life. And then I was trying to think I wanted to be I wanted to make it as hard and specific as possible so I said make it from the viewpoint of an Armenian make it from the viewpoint of someone that was born in 2004 and make it to be an impactful event that changed your life and it had a you know major consequences. So I waited it took about five seconds and it created 700 and I told it 750 words it wrote about 500 words and it gave me something that was really good very surprisingly it was like this would be passable and in my thoughts but then I thought you know here we also teach the seven step writing process because we're trying to get people to do it properly and so I said hey make me a rough draft of this so it made me another version that was a little bit rougher and then I asked it wait a second I'm gonna need a an outline and it made me an outline so then I took this test a little bit further and then I I stapled all three of these together and I took it and I had two people that I didn't tell them this was wrong chat GPT I had three two people tested like evaluate I said could you could you grade this for me I just want to make sure that I'm grading it in the same way they graded it based off of the rubric and they scored it's a minus B plus wow that's yeah that's a sort of an interesting little test that I did there again this is very interesting the capabilities and the level of what it did and as far as what it was it was a pretty good story about an Armenian who became a refugee because the area is in dispute which happens a lot in this country so they have to leave their area and then they were in a refugee camp and they so they gained a greater appreciation for everything and now that they're going you know now that they're in a university they so it's like this very interesting personal story that seems very believable on a lot of levels and it felt emotional again narrative first person so it was definitely worthwhile so there's a lot of power here Brent guys ask you a couple of quick questions about that sure so for you this was actually a pretty easy process to go through you simply type you type in your prompts and it caught back an answer in a few seconds and and you iterated that you you got one output and then you'd ask it to develop it further on the back end this is this is a tool that is using a tremendous amount of digital texts so to create this it had to draw on various posts articles ebooks written about Armenians including Armenians of the 21st century yes so it uses I watched one video talking about this and they said that it has a library of over one billion words it's again this is taken from pre-2022 so this is all up till 2021 so nothing you know very current so that would be one way to to manipulate the prompt is by asking it's something modern as far as if you're once we get to talking about pedagogy and trying to prevent it from preventing a student from using it but yeah and that's the other part is that the iterative process so it can remember what you just put in so that's why I was able to have it make a draft and then I was able to make it do an outline as well because it can remember what it just did which is fascinating fascinating Brent Brent we have another volunteer can I keep you up on stage for a minute more sure okay well hang on a second we have Rob Fentress from Virginia Tech let me see if I can get him to join us hey hello Rob hey how you doing good good to see you yeah I'm excited to join in this conversation because I've been using chat GPT extensively since it came out and it it boggles the mind if you have not tried it already you need to do so soon I am already using it to to increase my productivity tremendously I've created lots of content in my subject domain which is very specialized web accessibility used it to create documentation for poorly documented software and I am even interested in actually using it as an instructional tool itself because basically when you ask it a question all right you know it does a pretty darn good job to start with but if you know if you push it it will say things that are wrong and things that aren't always obviously wrong but that are subtly wrong so if what you're trying to do for your students is get them to think critically and determine whether they really are understanding the content then if you have them work and use chat GPT and have a conversation about the material that you're covering and part of the assignment is for them to interact with it and say no no chat GPT you're subtly wrong here you need to expand more and so forth I think that's really genuine learning so you know if people think about the negative effects but I mean it's incredible but of course you need to enjoy it while you can because I think we're doomed I mean it is that powerful that we we've not solved the alignment problem and you know it's obviously not you know it's not sentient maybe I don't know probably not sent yet but it is powerful enough and they have not solved the ability to restrict it I mean you can get around all of its restrictions with certain hacks and it could be used for great harm and the next version GPT for which this is 3.5 GPT for supposed to be 500 times more parameters than GPT 3 that's the rumor anyway so maybe a trillion parameters Rob two two quick questions first did you say the AI or the AL alignment problem AI alignment so basically the idea that you know we have certain things that we want the AI to do we're training it with that in mind but they're all sorts of ways that that can go wrong and we have not come up with really robust solutions for that and the actually the person at open AI the company that's responsible for chat GPT I read I listened to an interview with them just yesterday where they talked about you know like what are the dangers they had written a paper about this in academic paper where they basically said you know here's all these problems we're not close to solving them you know he tried to put some positive gloss on it but frankly his his more scary concerns were much more convincing to me than the very limited optimism I'm an optimistic person as regards to AI but I'm changing my mind yeah you brought up a great point as far as the critical thinking aspect because it does like to sort of fill things in sometimes and there might be some partial truths but it sort of decides to put things together if they're not a hundred percent true so that critical thinking aspect that is really important so I wrote an article about how to use chat GPT in higher education just in general and one of the things that I did is in writing the article I asked GPT to write the article for me right and it did and I asked it specifically one of the prompts was how could I prevent a student from just using it to sort of cheat right and so it gave me all these great things and one of the things it said is that oh well you can use plagiarism detection software to check your chat GPT that a student might turn in to check it to see if it's plagiarized well I tried the you know the one that I had it do for me I ran it across four different plagiarism detection softwares and all of them came back as far saying no there's a hundred percent original so yeah so it kind of fit or didn't give a full but it's really it's like using a calculator you know yeah in some levels yes everybody is going to be using this and that's gonna be that's not the skill that we're gonna be wanting people learn we're gonna be wanting people to learn how do you use chat GPT to write essays for you which is its own skill and that's the skill we're gonna have to start start teaching you mentioned an example of that a few minutes ago you mentioned the idea of having a having students use GPT to create something and then discussing its flaws in class I'm reminded of he slips my mind right now there's a historian who had a clever final project for students which they had to create a hoax and they had to make it look as convincing as possible and they would publish it to the web I don't know if the stirrings bell for an idea some of you might remember it was very controversial but the students had to basically master primary source material to make a like a fake ship in the American Civil War or Benjamin Franklin's lost beer recipe and that kind of thing and the trick was they had to make it convincing so they had to clearly know the content but then to criticize these through to discern the flaw you'd have to be able to have that level of critical thinking because I'm not saying discuss it in class I'm saying discuss it with with chat GPT have a conversation with it where you try to refine what is provided you you know and then you can share that you know like in a forum or whatever and then you could have a you know talk about it I'm just saying yeah process of going back and forth with it is going to be very informative I mean and that's just it like it's kind of scary because one of the other tests that I did is I'm writing this other book dealing with consumer psychology so I like I took one of the paragraphs and I gave it to chat GPT I said what do you think about my my paragraph and chat GPT looked at it and it gave me like excellent feedback like this is the type of feedback that I would give to a student so then I got me thinking wow I could use chat GPT to provide feedback to my students so and just like what you're saying I could cut out the middle man and say hey before you know create your essay and then have chat chat GPT check it to give you feedback and then show it to me or some process thereof or before it even gets to me they can go through and do several practice essays on their own with chat GPT and then now we're going to do this assignment so there's so many different levels and possibilities and I mean if you use for instruction as well so I'm giving a workshop coming up and I you know I always get stressed out about things like that and I tend to obsess over details I don't know how to get started get writers blocked and so I've got a you know a synopsis of the workshop just to you know just brief description for the catalog and the title and I said okay I'm going to be giving this one hour workshop here's the title here's the description write an outline for me of my presentation and it did with like spend 10 minutes on this five minutes on this block points and it's just it's stunning so it's using all the workshops descriptions that you and I and others have put up on the web and and and extended them very very nicely hang on one second friends I just want to bring up the third person who's had a hand raised has been very patient and this is phil oops hang on one second I'll actually press the correct button this is phil bellengard who is the founder of vic and let's see if we can let's see if we can bring him up there we go hello phil oh phil maybe having a connection problem hi phil can you sit with us yes I can see you I can see myself thanks no I just wanted to echo something which Brett said that chat gpt doesn't make mistakes and it was I was reading charlotte cohen's blog he has chat gpt about the philosopher lock and the answer came back completely incorrect and the reason is that lock and hops are always compared and contrasted with each other and it actually described the position of hops as being the position of lock so um it isn't there yet it does make mistakes and my concern is that so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be launching a 100 online master's course and of course that chat gpt is completely changed the um whole landscape when it comes to assessment and uh and how they are going to be replying um my thoughts are I mean I'm very fortunate in this and that the master's program is designed for practitioners is that I really am going to need to design the assessment questions to be deeply personal hmm um now it's great where I'm taking entrepreneurs and people in their 30s who are mid-career um and and the whole the whole objective of the course is all right apply this to your work environment but obviously in a more traditional higher education environment where particularly the bachelor's level where students are absorbing your learning then the assessment challenge becomes very interesting and I don't know what your thoughts are on that it does yeah I would totally agree that the more personal that it can be made than the greater the ability for the that individual having to actually write it right but again it's that aspect of there's still a component of chat gpt that I'll still be able to use no matter what the prompt is yeah because in essence what I'm doing is I'm using it as an an added tool so you could give me 50 prompts and I could use you know 50 different things to put into that gpt and it's going to give me something now I still need to use exactly what you were saying before as far as critical thinking to then review it and to say well no that's not quite right but this is an overall building block that I can take and enhance and make it that much better the other big problem that currently again it's developing they said there's going to be an update to a chat gpt before christmas season but currently it has a huge problem trying to do in-text citations all right I wasn't able to get it to give me references at the very end so I kind of did that okay on a small thing but in-text citations no it won't do it at all make sure to check those citations because I've seen them hit they're actually totally made up all right these two were right I gave it a simple thing of a compare contrast essay of american speeches so it was able to do that record but again it was just two things so yeah I understand so your point about the plagiarism engine not spotting it yeah well actually I read something that they're actually working on that they're working on basically watermarking of the text somehow which is interesting I'm not quite sure how that would work but even if it does I would imagine if a plagiarism detection software can identify some pattern that reveals that it could also you know somebody could redo it so it doesn't do that you know now but we're getting into to some of this aspects right and I've tried playing devil's advocate with this thing because in reality on some levels if we're looking at it through the lens of cheating right nothing nothing new has happened nothing has happened because I could before this I could go to my buddy pay him 50 bucks and he could write it for me right so that's my chat gpt before this I could there's plenty there's multiple ai's that already exist where I could just give it hey here's here's an essay can you plagiarize this for me sure here's a new version that's been paraphrased that won't be detected by plagiarism software because the ai made a new version of it so but what we're talking about here with chat gpt is that right now at least it's completely free and it's easy to use I don't need to know code I just put it in a text box and it magically creates it because i'm just asking it normal human question of hey write me an essay about democracy you know that's something that happened within the last five years in china boom and it'll do it instantly and again so that's cheating but if we can use it properly as a tool then we can advance all of it I need to pause just for a quick question the the chat box is on fire there is an incredible amount of stuff in chat let me let me just ask chat people is it okay if I copy and paste this to a blog tomorrow I'll anonymize everybody remove everybody's name just just let me know in the chat if you're not using the chat never mind sorry Brent please please go on or I'm sorry I think it was Rob who started to speak yeah Rob was talking um what was I what was I the where were away uh let's ask gpt I mean where was Rob well can I just throw in this um is this going to revive the Viva in other words the the assessment is going to be done by effectively interview hmm yeah the oral oral interview yeah yeah I mean that's that's one aspect that's one possibility uh because in talking to some instructors here at this university we talked about how there needs to be more being done in class right as far as we're actively doing things we're we're engaging we're writing in class but and and I agree with that on some level but it made me when I even when I was talking about that it made me think of my my my time when I I had to take the GRE right and when I did that it was so official I had to go into a special locked room there was a guard watching me I couldn't use microsoft word I had to use a blank basically basically text entry that wasn't connected to the internet and I did horrible and guess what I think I'm a great writer I get a's in my classes but I wasn't able to write like I usually write so if we make an artificial thing of well you can't use the internet to write because you might use chat gpt when now we're kind of changing things and making it artificial because the other big thing that I come come back with and again I'm always doing the devil's advocate right because there's so many instances right now where a student graduates they go to their workplace the workplace says hey I need you to write this report for me and I need to do tomorrow or in two days what are you talking about this should take a week all my assignments took a week oh well you don't know how to use AI to make this faster so companies and businesses are requiring their employees to use AI so if we in education or in academia aren't teaching the students how to use AI how to have AI literacy to create documents properly they still need to have that knowledge but if they're not using it to enhance their capabilities to make things faster to have more output then they're going to be suffering when they get out into the real world where it's a requirement to be able to have that skill and Brent I did remember what I was gonna respond I was just gonna say you had mentioned the fact that it's free and I think that is that is an essential component because I'd read about chat gpt3 and I was like very intrigued and I wanted to do it but you know cost money and I was like well it sounds like there's the learning curve there and you know so I held off but the fact that this is free has it makes it so much more fluid you can just play around and it'll be interesting to see once once it costs money but I mean I don't care how much it is I I'll so I have the exact same thought and I because the thing is like I've been trying to see like okay because I'm trying to I'm the I'm also the director dealing with the center for teaching and learning here at this university right so I'm always trying to help the instructors so I wanted to show them I'm like hey this is how a student can use AI right now to create things before chat gpt right and it was somewhat difficult because you had to like find certain places and then it was limited or you could pay 20 bucks and then you could get more you know so that's there are some limitations with it it's still available you can find it but with chat gpt manage so easy so there was this other thing that I checked on because I was trying to find out well how much would it cost you know like because they are going to eventually try to make money off of it because right now five or one million people have used it since monday by monday a million people so now at least five million people have used it right so in order to do this it's burning up through servers luckily this is funded of course by elon musk as well as connection with microsoft but they did some calculation that it cost about four cents for every single entry that gets done right so every prompt four cents that's relatively I thought that was for conversation yeah so so I mean the thing is it could be relatively cheap and think about hey if you were to offer this and just make it like a simple app on your phone where oh yeah subscription it costs you five bucks a month I think they'd be raking in the money especially with students that want to be able to quickly answer questions I think this is going to be a gigantic moneymaker the other thing that I wanted to quickly add is so a question was asked to google because they had an open call here recently saying hey are you worried about chat gpt competing with you because some people are saying that this is the new google right because I can ask it anything so google responded with something very interesting they said no we're not worried we have multiple ai's that can do exactly what chat gpt can do right now right the reason that they haven't released anything is because they're very much worried as far as their image because there are some issues with chat gpt and giving slightly false information so they want to make sure to iron that out a bit more to limit liability before they start to release things just like this the future is very wide open for them there's an interesting chrome plugin I've been using which basically accesses chat gpt and adds it to your google results in parallel to google results it's very interesting just to run that and to compare how they work friends we have a another person who wants to join us this is a wonderful writer uh john warner and we bring him up on stage and see if we can fit him on the screen I think this is the maximum we've ever done at one time so hold on good afternoon hello to everybody good to see you sir good to see you where are you today I'm at home in uh Charleston South Carolina area all right all right well stay warm what are you what are you thinking about this now you've written a whole series of good articles and a bunch of tweet storms um you've called you've called the chat gpt a tool that lays bare the paucity of a lot of writing instruction especially in k-12 where do you stand now is this the apocalypse or is this actually a a good step in progress no I I've seen it from the beginning as an opportunity to re-examine the values we attach to the things we ask students to do in school context as the discussion has been about so far um you know I am uh I'm not in the academy so some of the concerns of folks in here are very different than mine um you know as I as I listen I think there's a number of different things we're talking about here we're talking about using AI as a skill that students should have and be able to do which is absolutely a fact right we we should be doing this we are talking about using writing as a tool of assessment in order to demonstrate learning as a kind of certification feature of education um we are uh talking about well we're and where my focus is as a as somebody as a teacher of writing right and somebody who's primarily concerned with teaching students to write um one of the things I don't want us to lose sight of is a couple things one is particularly when we we start thinking about the academic dishonesty angle if you give students something worth doing they will do it the challenge we've given ourselves in uh k-12 and higher ed is much of the stuff we ask students to do doesn't seem worth doing or the shortcut to the grade is uh more desirable rather than the long trip through learning um and chat gpt you know exposes some of the kind of rote assessments you might have in an English or history class in k-12 or even even college for that matter as an empty exercise in assembling syntax as opposed to a work of thinking and analysis which is what we think we're asking them to do when we assign these things um it should kill things like the admissions essays to colleges which the chat gpt can turn out in infinite numbers uh almost instantly and and personalized we were even talking about how you can get it to personalize you can say like yeah i i only have one parent or i come from this background or i had cancer when i was a child and it'll it'll do that with absolute facility um with perfect uh syntax that will check the box of admissions offices but one of the things that that um so what i come down to and i think all those things are important and they should all be talked about and they should be talked about at the level of values which for me is what do we want students to learn and why do we want them to learn that as opposed to why do we want them to prove a sort of fidelity to um what i lectured about or what we think is important to this sort of stuff is to not miss the aspect of using writing to learn um one of my mantras that i use in in all my books and talks and all that kind of stuff is writing is thinking writing is both the expression of an idea and the exploration of an idea the act of writing causes the writer to process the material both consciously and subconsciously and i swear to god even sometimes unconsciously stuff will come to me i have no idea where it came from i didn't even know i knew it and it rises up and it winds up on the page and that is the kind of um ability that makes us human that is the kind of activity that makes us human that's the kind of experience that makes us human and while i am like everybody else messing around with uh chat gpt like how can i get all the stuff i have to do that i don't want to do to do it for me and it does an okay job um but ultimately what i realized when i was trying to experiment with it it's actually me denying myself an important part of my own thinking process about the stuff that i'm involved in um it is a great shortcut to content um to to a product uh it may be a shortcut i asked it i um i still occasionally write humor pieces for my old employer miss weenies and i uh i gave it a prompt to to write a a speech um by jordan peterson um explaining the importance of stuffing live weasels down your pants and um it gave me a um it gave me like a decent start and it gave me a little bit of um a little bit of primer around the way he speaks and his rhythms and his word choice um but ultimately i tried to prompt it with three or four other additive elements and it didn't help at all it was really like okay i need to take this and i put it to one side and i open my word processing program and i just started typing my own thing it was it was generative but ultimately in the final version 10 15 percent of its language wound up but so it became a kind of brainstorming tool not a great writing tool for something that actually does ultimately require a kind of inspiration or intuition or that kind of stuff um so i i just like to remind people like writing is yes it's a skill that we demonstrate through making products but it's also a living um experience that at least for me is part of what reminds me that i'm human and helps me process the world and chat gpt cannot do that it's purely a syntax machine it's a syntax generation um um matching machine so when it can do well on our prompts sometimes i think we want to think about our prompts but also i think we want to think about the process what are we valuing when we assign that and how can if we still value that prompt what can we assess that will um make a put a sort of broader wrap our arms around a broader part of the students experience and creating that artifact john sounds like a kind of de-familiarization of writing um you know making us rethink what we do with writing in class especially in high school yeah i mean i mean the the tragedy of what we've done in writing it's sort of like eighth grade on although now it's even in grade school it's really i mean it's really bad you know and i've been shouting about this stuff for for quite a long time now and uh why they can't write came out over four years ago at this point um and now chat gpt i can't tell you how many emails and calls and stuff i've gotten we're all some people like oh yeah this is a problem simply because a machine can do it and they're worried about cheating and assessment and this kind of stuff but it was always a problem and the problem was it made students uh not practice thinking through writing it made them primarily my biggest worry as a writing teacher it made them hate writing particularly school contexts you're utterly uninterested in a course that was never like their favorite first year writing is never going to be anybody that can't wait to take that but they were actively repelled by their first year writing course the terrible outcome friends i'm conscious of time i'm also conscious of the fact that this is a mantle right now and i'm going to try and clear the decks a bit and and go for some greater gender representation okay not a couple of you a couple of you off right now but i can bring bring me back up but hang on just a second that i'll make some room for this um and let me first of all welcome dr jess stahl um who is coming to us from the northwest commission on colleges and uh hello hello jess hello thank you so much yes so i'm affiliated with the northwest commission on colleges and universities which is an institutional creditor so thank you for adding me to the panel here i think i'd just like to jump in and say that really chat gpt isn't giving us any new information about the need that we need to modernize higher education but it is probably taking away the delusion that those changes are still optional or that they could occur over a longer timeline than maybe one to two years so i think we've seen this evolution from the idea of a sage on the stage to then being a guide on the side and i would say that chat gpt is a fantastic guide on the side so that's probably once again out and so i think where we are now is more um needing to focus on building strong relationships like mentoring relationships professional relationship with learners and providing them with access to valuable networks valuable resources that they can access only within academic institutions so what that looks like will probably be different for all of the different institutions but i would encourage all institutions to be really thinking about where the value in higher education lies at this point i think this is really kind of holding up a mirror to that that there's value in higher ed for the institution because they charge tuition so there's a financial value there's a value for faculty and staff because they're paid by those institutions so they've got that financial value what is the value being provided to students because that's actually now the the currency of the realm for higher education moving forward just that's a that's a fantastic point um i'm you know you're coming from an accrediting agency um what um as an accreditor and how do you think this is this might play out over the next few years i mean we'll be in that sense of urgency will you see that will you try to help value more innovation more highly or will will you actually look for people for institutions who are implementing some response to chat gbt in curricula or in pedagogy so i think that accreditors are always looking for innovation and in particular we're looking for innovation that eliminates equity gaps and in student achievement and outcomes for all students so i think that will continue to be a focus i think that tools like chat gbt do have some limitations in that area they exhibit the bias that is inherent in our societies because the data that they're trained on is us right so whatever is present in society is going to be present within these tools um it looks like open ai has tried to build in some filtering and sort of some guardrails and and guidelines so that they could minimize some of the some of those effects but i think that there are clever ways that you can prompt this tool that many people have demonstrated already online where you can still kind of get around that you could you could for example get chat gbt to express racism or tell you things that it that it shouldn't tell you and you can see where open ai has even sort of tried to build in some guardrails around that if you ask those questions directly it won't answer them or we'll kind of go around them or tell you it can't answer that type of question but for example if you were to tell it to tell you a story about a person who had certain traits or to answer me in an aggressive style then it would do that right so so there are you know ways that it can be manipulated so i think that accreditors will always be really sensitive to how these tools are being used for education and you know how is ed tech showing up you know in the curriculum and how that's utilized and i think that certainly eliminating equity gaps is always going to be at the heart of accreditation uh thank you thank you jess that's that's a great answer i know you're on the spot and this is something which is happening much faster than accreditation does but that gives us a great preview of what to look for yeah our university is actually going through accreditation right now so we started to do self-study and then we're going to have visitors coming here later this year or later next year and that's one of the big things that we're trying to push is to see well what's going to happen within the next few years how do we need to change the skills that we're teaching students so that when they graduate they'll be that much more successful and i think being able to use tools like you know chat gpt or just ai in general that's the big push now is ai literacy and the problem that i keep running into as i try to push right is our students they're already using ai like that's happening that's already that's been happening for a couple years already so if the faculty doesn't have proper ai literacy they're never going to be able to address this with the students so it can't be this thing of because i've been reviewing sort of the academic integrity policies right we can't just make a block blanket statement of saying no you can't use ai because that's that would be completely self-defeating in fact you know grammarly is ai right of course we're not going to say you can't use grammarly you can't use word word microsoft word has built in ai more and more things will have these components built in we have to understand how to properly use them and then properly motivate the students to go through it in the proper way so they're not doing academic dishonesty and they're actually learning the process having the fundamentals so that they can then use these in the proper way so it's not a crutch but it's an additional tool to be able to do more. Brent i understand that's that's what you would like to see and i agree personally i'm just thinking that we should also expect to see people trying to block this and we we saw this for a long time with wikipedia and we still do you know attempts to block wi-fi from classrooms for example used to happen i could imagine calls for this occurring at the enterprise level but i i wanted to make sure we had room for everyone's questions and and fenzi coming to us from the university of manewar to join us so let's bring in us up on stage hello and greetings hello um yeah and and thanks was my my uh question and comment really kind of fits in with what jess and ande we're just saying about let's let's focus on the students not let's not look at this from the faculty perspective of oh no what do i do about this but how does this help the students instead of how is this harming the students and so my my plan right away is to have my students try this out and say what can you do with it see if you can figure out its limitations see if you can figure out its strengths and then let's think about well okay what is it not doing really well what is it doing really well and how could it help you as a learner and you know just as i've been kind of playing around and having conversations with it you know i'm kind of learning you know about how i would use it and how i wouldn't use it and i think i think it's important to not forget the learner in all of this absolutely um and what do you uh what do you teach or what do you study uh i teach educational technology perfect perfect excellent excellent uh it seems like we have a lot of pedagogical approaches that we've discussed so far from rethinking student work to give students something worth doing to have chat generate stuff for students to discuss to use chat gbt for feedback to assign deeply personal pieces to turn to oral assignments or oral assessments and to teach AI literacy these are whole stereo is there anything else that instructors should be thinking about doing at the classroom level the the only thing i'd like to add here is uh john i thought you you gave a great thing as far as helping helping us think about it as far as what is someone losing when they don't write things out right because having worked with a lot of different students man i have so many students and we've seen this trend line going like this constantly going up here with our undergraduate students and working right now we're seeing lots of undergraduate students that are working full time full time and still going to college full time so that's a major problem so the number one thing on their mind of course they want to get that degree which they shouldn't be thinking that they should be thinking i want to get an education but they're thinking i want that degree and they're trying to think what can i do to save myself time that's their main thing that's leading everything unfortunately right because it should be a one thing on learning this so every every single thing they're going to be trying to use whatever mechanism whatever tool is out there to save them time chat gpt is going to be major factor in that one of one of the uh main points i make and why they can't write which i intended to be a book of writing pedagogy but soon became a book over half it was an analysis of the systems in which student writing happens is that the the greatest constraint when it comes to helping students learn to write is not that we don't know how to teach them it's not that students don't want to write it's not the effort it's not that stuff it's it's purely one of resources time and what you're speaking to there is student time right the the amount of time they have available to dedicate to their studies but also instructor time if if one thing we know about teaching writing is that one on one attention works if you ever if google john mcfee and learning to write and you'll come up with a half a dozen essays by his former students about how he taught writing which is basically a one on one tutorial now we maybe can't achieve that but if you give me a maximum of 45 students in a semester three sections of 15 uh i will have them on a trajectory to becoming self-regulating writers no problem i never had those conditions in the entirety of my career the fewest students i ever had was 65 nine semesters of over 180 students so uh when you cannot do the work that we know works there's not a lot we can do about it it's not necessarily that we don't know what to do about these things it's that that we are so resource constrained around reacting to them that it becomes a bit of a you know a bit of a whack-a-mole around this is where the pardon my french the cop shit comes in where we start policing student behavior and we start blocking them off from websites and we say don't use Wikipedia and and put a spy cam on their laptops because we can't actually have a relationship with them we either we choose that and resource it or we go down the black spiral hole to the bottom i i hope we don't do that and you know what you're saying john is it's being echoed in the chat too about a lot of people talking about individualizing instruction and who has time for that and what how could chat gpt be used as an extra set of hands in the classroom to you know provide some of that one-on-one assistance to students and you know uh karen mentioned too about you know neurodiverse individuals how this might be a tool to help them and you know my my population that i teach are non-traditional learners and you know uh Brent you mentioned people who are working full time and this is exactly what i plan to do with them is to help them figure out how does this tool help you not to save time so much but how to help you learn better because you know as john said the goal of of your degree is not just to get the degree the goal is to actually learn yeah yeah what i would say to faculty and here i certainly don't represent um an accrediting agency but just really just myself as a person but what i what i would say to faculty is that most of what you do probably in your day today is really emerging as not that valuable probably almost all of it will need to change and in fact your your role is going to be strongly questioned so if you're looking at what you should be doing differently in your role i think really at the end of the day you're looking at answering the question what can you do better than the most advanced technology and it won't be imparting facts and it won't be presenting curriculum and it won't be evaluating learning and it won't be preventing cheating and all those things it's not going to be that what it is going to be is how human and important and valuable can you make your relationships with the learners so that you are doing that skill better than an advanced technology like chat gpt that can mimic a very fake relationship it could mimic and people will anthropomorphize this technology so they will feel a relationship to it because when you ask it to answer in the style of someone you're actually asking it to take on a personality and it does that and when you say write me a story about somebody in the very specific details you're actually asking it to do what we would call empathizing taking on the perspective of another and it actually does that really well and it actually reflects and expresses that back really well possibly better than many people do so it's really going to be the strength of your relational interpersonal skills with learners that you're going to have the human advantage and right now if your relationships are not genuine meaningful deep and helpful to students then that's you know you're not going to be able to compete in that arena either and that's one of the few human things that you'll have left us really like this advantage so that would be my advice to faculties to think about how you're building those relationships and then for institutions I would say what type of human social networks that are very rewarding and professional networks are very rewarding that you're providing for students and what kind of resources do you have at your campus or in your online programs that learners couldn't access elsewhere because there are sort of these economies of scale and things that you can provide at the scale of an of a learning institution that they couldn't get elsewhere and that also is valuable just so you know Jess you have a big fan club and chat and including me that was an incredible incredible response however I just have to put up one problem it is 257 Eastern time that means we have only three minutes left of our session together so let me put to you two questions first can we continue this topic in a following session either next Thursday or the Thursday after please in the in the chat let me know and the four of you on stage would that be good do you think sure that would be fantastic and the second question is I'm not ending things just just hang on a second there are 22 questions in our list right now that we haven't had a chance to get to those you put them forward can I copy and post them to the blog again without you know anonymizing them without you just let me know in the chat or direct message me because these are great I'm just I'm just wowed how far we've come in just about 52 minutes just let me just ask John and Brent and especially Anne and any responses to Jess throwing down the gauntlet we have to rethink everything in higher ed because a lot of it isn't going to be useful anymore yeah no I I want to echo some of that because one of the things that I say here at this university and again I get a lot of faces right is what I tell my students is hey there is no information you don't need information from me on how to do this there's millions of youtube videos there's millions of web pages that tell you how to do it so you don't need me for that all I'm here to do is to answer questions or to make it more relevant right to make it that's part of my my aspect of what I'm doing is I'm trying to motivate you and in motivating you by giving you the relevancy I'm helping you to understand I'm giving you an opportunity to use those skills to actually have satisfaction by seeing that oh I'm gaining the skill and I can use it and I can express it and I'm becoming that much more effective and capable for when I move on from the university right so I totally believe that I totally agree that we're there to help clarify to answer questions to motivate to give them an opportunity to use that skill again that relationship aspect I think is is right on for sure and I echo what Jess was was saying too about breaking what's happening in higher ed because who is higher ed designed for and the systems that we have now work for those people only and if we really want to make higher ed more equitable we have to break down what what we're doing and really make the best use of of what faculty are there for I've been echoing everything else I've been ready for this for literally years I've been mystified because I'm not a real academic and I've never sort of been inculcated into the system I've been mystified why more of higher education is not attuned to student learning for the entirety of my time intersecting with these institutions it's about credentialing and signaling and all those things that were aware of that the institutions also do but I've been ready for it for a long time and that's why I'm excited for the appearance of this kind of technology because it forces us to confront these things and talk about what we value and look at the things that the areas where we're constrained and hopefully start to put resources into those learners who would benefit for more resources rather than the continuing constraints and limits we put on the students who probably need the most help in terms of accessing that learning well said and that's a great moment to end on I think just just the four of you Brent John Jess and thank you for joining us on this rolling panel and and all the other panelists and who have been on and also all the great questions thank you so much this has been an extraordinary session one that I think has covered a lot of ground and one that we haven't finished so I'm going to see about we're doing this or resuming this next week or the week after I will share everybody's comments on my blog post coming up along with the entire recording that'll be up shortly let me just quickly wrap this up with the points coming up for our next sessions if you'd like to continue talking about this right now over the next week please you know head to twitter where I am use the hashtag FTTE or to my blog bryanalexander.org I'm going to add a couple others to this list next time if you'd like to look into our previous sessions on pedagogy of writing on on plagiarism honesty on technology in general just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive we have sessions coming up just go to forum.futureeducation.us to see those and if any of you have projects that you'd like to share including using chat gpt please suit me a note I'd be glad to share them with this awesome community thank you all for a fantastic session my mind is spinning this has been terrific I love the way that we've brought our collective mind to bear on this fast moving and important subject if I don't talk to you all for the next few days have a great end of semester have a great holiday if you're celebrating have great downtime in general above all be safe and take care and we'll see you next time online thanks everybody bye bye